By the clock on the wall, Rob McCord should be on his break between open houses and arriving at the office any minute. It’s a good solid property. That’s what I’ll tell him. A great starter. Realtor to realtor, virtues and shortcomings. On the way back to the van, I run through the features.

As I turn onto the street, the flat box blanks skid around in the back.

My brother told me lies all the time when I was young. That’s one of the main things I remember about him from then. We were different generations, ten years apart, a boomer and an Xer. But they were mostly harmless interesting lies that were, more than anything, good stories. At least until I repeated them to people who knew better. Around 1980, he told me it was unfortunate we’d flown to and from the UK on a 747A because on the 747B the stewardesses – that was the term in those days – were topless, and pens were provided so you could write on their breasts. When he got his commercial pilot’s licence not too many years later, I had a feeling I knew why. Mum said we should buy something to congratulate him, and I suggested a pen with ‘Happy writing!’ engraved on it.

It is having Cedar in my life that makes me realise what I have missed with my niece, who is now in her teens. There is common ground there – she plays violin and Lacy teaches it – but that connection is unmade so far.

I was finishing school when my brother and parents had a falling-out. He had recently moved to Hong Kong, my father passed through on a work trip and something happened. When I pushed my mother on it, she told me my final exams were my priority and they had had differences over my brother’s lifestyle. It was clear I’d be given no detail, so I filled in the blanks myself.

Simon already had a rather retro porn-star moustache at that time, so it was easy to picture him shirtless, Cathay tie loose around his neck, crew parties raging till dawn in his apartment high on the Peak, with the lights of Central down below. In the movie version, the morning-after shot would pan across the scene, finding clothes strewn about the place – mostly women’s underwear – and the maid discreetly brushing up remnants of coke lines from the kitchen counter, collecting spent vodka bottles. That was the Simon I imagined, and talked about at school, with confidence.

I don’t know if all happy families really are alike, while unhappy families each find their own way of getting there, but I suppose it was that gap opening up that made me wonder if we weren’t so happy after all, and in a way that seemed to me nowhere near specific enough.

The exams I was to focus on went well. I got into Medicine. I was the star in the family, briefly, and I wasn’t used to that. I hardly needed to think of my brother at all then.